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Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture
Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…
Beyond the Clash of Civilizations – NYTimes.com
Beyond the Clash of Civilizations – NYTimes.com. On the one side were the radicals, who would use more and more demonstrative violence to underline the weakness of the powers-that-be in an attempt to mobilize the masses on their side, and who would finally find themselves isolated and ostracized by those same masses, as the failure of Egyptian and Algerian radicals had proven in the 1990s. On the other side, a growing amount of Islamists were converting to the creed of pluralism and democracy, as was already then the case in Turkey. That change would not take place without turmoil within…
It’s about us
What a great idea for fighting for the rights of others. Don’t make it about them, make it about us. Normally I wouldn’t espouse this particular view, but it seems to work in this scenario. Non-Americans don’t have constitutional protections, so international scholars who are denied entry into the country have no legal standing. American scholars do have the ability to argue violation of the First Amendment. Good strategy. academic freedom, Freedom of Speech, war on terror[ism][ists]